Amazon’s public rebuttal, released on February 21 2026, clarified that a 13‑hour outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) was caused by user error rather than a failure of its AI coding assistant, Kiro. The incident affected the AWS Cost Explorer service in mainland China and did not impact core compute, storage, or database services.
The outage, which began in the early hours of December 2025, was traced to a misconfigured access control that allowed Kiro to modify permissions in Cost Explorer. Amazon’s statement emphasized that the AI tool followed the instructions it received and that the problem was a human error in setting up the environment, not a defect in the AI system itself. A second event reported by the Financial Times was denied by Amazon as “entirely false,” with the company noting it did not occur within AWS but elsewhere in its broader operations.
AWS remains Amazon’s most profitable division. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the cloud unit generated $35.6 billion in revenue and $12.5 billion in operating income. Revenue in the third quarter of 2025 was $33 billion, with an operating margin of 34.6%. The previous quarter’s margin fell to 32.9% as Amazon accelerated spending on AI infrastructure, a trend that has stabilized in Q3 2025.
Management reiterated that the incident was a user error and that the AI tool performed as designed. Amazon announced new safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access, to prevent similar incidents. The company’s focus on AI adoption—targeting 80% of developers to use AI coding assistants weekly—highlights the growing reliance on agentic tools and the associated operational risks.
The outage underscores the broader challenge of integrating AI into critical infrastructure. While AWS continues to drive a large share of Amazon’s revenue and operating income, the incident has prompted tighter controls and a reassessment of the balance between rapid AI deployment and operational reliability. The event also illustrates the importance of clear governance around AI tools in high‑stakes environments.
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